The work of Singapore-based artist Keng Lye could easily pass for some nice photos of sea life – except that they’re not photos, but three dimensional photorealistic paintings! Keng achieves the 3d effect similarly to 3d printer – he pours a layer of resin into a bowl and paints it with acrylics, layer by layer revealing more and more of each creature. His painting technique is almost the same as Riusuke Fukahori’s, but Keng found a new twist to it – he made his creations protrude from the surface.

You may think you’re looking at a bizarre painting, but look closer, and you’ll realize that it’s actually an anamorphic 3D sculpture. The massive portrait of Malian actor Sotigui Kouyaté is the latest work of French artist Bernard Pras. It was created entirely out of recycled materials such as clothes and rags, wood, glass lanterns, dishes, rubber and other trash Bernard would gather from the installation site.

Even though Ramon Bruin has a degree in airbrushing, it’s his other skill that made our jaws drop. A Netherlands-based artist shows demonstrates how well he’s mastered the art of 3D illusions, all drawn by pencil. As he puts it, trying photo-realism was just another way for him to push his boundaries and add another technique to his portfolio.

Hiding in the last row of a boring class in high school shouldn’t always be regarded as slacking. What once started of as fooling around with Photoshop and 3D Max in the back of AutoCAD class, has now developed into signature style that 30-year-old digital artist Michael Oswald describes as ‘photo manipulation on steroids’.

Do you remember the amazing 3D Pencil Drawings by 17 Year Old Fredo we’ve shown you last year? Well, don’t be deceived, this is not another collection of his work. The sketches below are all drawn by the 21-year-old Nagai Hideyuki from Japan. Inspired by British 3D street artist Julian Beever, Hide uses the same projection technique called anamorphosis which allows to create 3D illusion when viewed from the correct angle.

Do you remember Jamie Beck and Kevin Burg who creatively used animated GIFs to create so-called cinemagraphs? Seattle-based illustrator Dain Fagerholm also adopted animated GIF technology to make his hand drawn monsters come to life. However, this time GIFs were used to create a cool 3-D effect. Technique is one thing, but what really catches my attention is the cuteness of Dain’s illustrations. It seems that childhood book illustrations have suddenly come to life.

Swiss artist Felice Varini has been creating illusions of flat graphics superimposed on three dimensional spaces since 1979 using the same eye-deceiving technique called anamorphosis. The complete shapes can only be seen when viewed at certain angles, otherwise the viewer will only see some random broken pieces.

It’s hard to believe, but these lively goldfish swimming in the bowls are not real at all! A Japanese artist named Riusuke Fukahori is painting these incredibly realistic three-dimensional goldfish using acrylic paint layered over clear resin. Just like 3D printer, the artists paints the fish layer by layer, with the sandwiched slices revealing slight more about each creature.

Do you remember the Anamorphic Typography by Joseph Egan we’ve posted earlier? Well, Truly Design made this cool Medusa illusion using the same eye-deceiving technique called anamorphosis. This challenging work was implemented in the factory/urban lab which hosted Sub Urb Art.

Young Chilean artist Fredo draws absolutely mind-blowing three-dimensional pencil drawings that look like they’re about to jump off the page. Well, actually, he’s already 20 years old at the time of writing this article, but our title is not completely a lie – majority of his works were submitted to Deviant Art back in 2008 or even 2007 when he was 16-17 years old. Some of his 3d drawings took him only 30 minutes to complete, but there were cases when he needed a whole month.

Andrew Myers must be one of the most patient artists around – he creates stunning 3-dimensional portraits by drilling 8,000 to 10,000 individual screws into a plywood panel, then paints over the head of each screw to enhance the 3D effect.